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Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare branding and communications expert with more than 25 years of industry experience. and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also worked extensively healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

When it comes to investing in enterprise software, just about any deal can turn sour. If you’re acquiring a mission-critical platform, there’s an even bigger risk involved, and the consequences of failure are typically dire. So any company making such a purchase may feel trapped after the contract is signed and the die has been cast.

One might hope that when hospital and health systems buy an EMR — probably the most expensive and critical software buy they’ll make in a decade — that they feel comfortable with their vendor. Ideally, hospitals should be prepared to switch vendors if they feel the need.

In reality, however, it looks like many hospitals and health systems feel they’re trapped in their relationship with their EMR vendor. A new study by research firm Black Book has concluded that about a solid subset of hospitals feel trapped in their relationship with their EMR vendor. (Given what I hear at professional gatherings, I’m betting that’s on the low side, as their EMR has driven so many hospitals deep into debt.)

Anyway, Black Book compiles an HIT Loyalty Index which assesses the stability of vendors’ customer base and measures those customers’ loyalty. For its current batch of stats, Black Book drew on 2,077 hospital users, asking about their intentions to renew current contracts, recommend their inpatient EMR/HIT vendor to peers and the likelihood of their buying additional products like HIE and RCM tools from their existing vendors.

The results shouldn’t give any great pleasure to HIT vendors. All told, loyalty to inpatient EMR/HIT vendors fell 6%, from 81% to 75% committed clients. While it’s not horrible to have 75% truly happy with your product, this is not a metric you want to see trending downward.

When you combine these numbers with other signs of dissatisfaction, the picture looks worse. Roughly 25% of respondents said that they were only loyal to their vendor because they were forced to follow administrative directives. And as we all know, ladies and gents of the vendor world, you can’t buy love. These 25% of dissatisfied professionals will do their job, but they aren’t going to evangelize for you, nor will they be quick to recommend more of your products.

All is not bleak for EMR vendors, however. Some HIT vendors saw year-to-year growth in hospital client loyalty. Vendors with the biggest loyalty increases included Allscripts, Cerner, CPSI, NTT Data and athenahealth/RazorInsights.

By the way I noted, with a touch of amusement, that mega-costly Epic doesn’t appear on the latter list. Just sayin’.